


Awake O Sleeper

by meradorm



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, executioner alfred autocrucifying himself on his own sexual frustration, in which the hunter breaks alfred without lifting a single finger, the complicated dream courtship of a traumatized nightmare god
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-12
Updated: 2016-03-12
Packaged: 2018-05-26 01:09:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6217540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meradorm/pseuds/meradorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The hunter never woke up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Awake O Sleeper

**Author's Note:**

> Second verse, same as the first. This is similar to my other Hunter/Alfred fic (The harvest is past, etc.) and with a little editing could possibly even have been combined or continuous. I originally imagined I'd write post-game fics for the hunter and Alfred in all three endings (this would have been Honoring Wishes), but what I ended up with was much more interesting to write...
> 
> By the way, I did a Bloodborne Let's Play and my hunter is the hunter I'm thinking of in these fics. If you want more from these two it can be read [here.](http://meradorm.tumblr.com/post/132008093720/bloodborne-screenshot-lets-play-masterpost)

Listen: this place is a secret.

Here is the mixture: an attic room, well-kept. Floorboards, dusky corners. Night. Eileen watching him (she always watches). Alfred standing young and golden. His health is an insult. His breath is shame.

"The hunter never woke up," Eileen tells him.

"You mean he's dead," Alfred replies. He is looking at the body on the bed. Set out like wine.

"No, child, if he was dead I would have said it; just like that. It's not for an old woman to mince words."

"But the night of the hunt is over. Shouldn't old Gehrman have - "

" - Yes."

(Alfred too remembers the dream. A silence then. All things singing in the dark.)

"They wanted him out of the clinic," Eileen continues. "No use in his taking up a stretcher when there's nothing wrong with him, really. Brought him up here to the old workshop, I did. Bed in the attic. None left to use it. Mind him every once in a while, will you? Don't tell people he's here."

"Why have you asked this of me?" There was no love lost between a hunter of hunters and an executioner.

"He knew you. Mentioned you to me. Asked me to bury you, in fact." She eyes him for a moment. "I suppose he was a little premature." Alfred doesn't like her laugh. "...That and if he lasts long enough for dust to start gathering on him we'll have to get him out of his clothes. Rather a man did it, for decency's sake."

Alfred kneels at his bedside. He looks carefully at the hunter. His chest is rising and falling and his lips are apart.

“That’s all I'm to do? Look after him?”

“Yes. Stay a few hours. He doesn’t need the whole night.”

“...Do they ever wake up when this happens?” Alfred asks her. "Do you expect him to wake up?"

“How should I know? I’ve never seen this before. I don’t know what he is.”

It occurs to Alfred later that this was a very strange way to have put things. 

“I'll pray for him.”

He turns down the low gold lamplight. A chair by the bed. An uninteresting book.

Eileen leaves Alfred the key.

He is alone with him.

* * *

Time passes. Alfred get into the habit of coming up there almost whenever he could. At first the hunter was something like a facet of the upholstery. Easily ignored, but not really. Then, once Alfred was used to him, the steady beat of his presence somehow blending with his own, he became an object of fascination. He stood out like a blot of ink on a blank page. Like a rock thrown into the center of a pond. There was a weight to him.

He knew him, once. Not well.

He watches his face, dark and peaceful. Alfred thinks this he looks just like a doll. 

An enigma all folded up in wrapping paper. Alfred feels tender. In this packaging the hunter is easy to consume.

"Look at you!" he says, his voice soft. His tongue clicks quietly in disapproval. He hesitates, and then kneels. He touches the pad of his thumb to the speck of dust on his eyelashes. The hunter's eye trembles autonomously beneath the lid. Alfred's lips thin.

Then, stillness.

Alfred unbuttons the cuff on the hunter’s thin wrist and touches a rag to water and then to his skin. The hunter's hands are warm, and then clean.

Alfred folds them over the hunter's stomach, and then covers them with his own.

* * *

Eileen has developed a tendency to drop in unexpectedly.

She looks at their hands.

"Heard the lad spoke words to you at Cainhurst."

"...He did indeed."

He was saying all kinds of things, trying to get through to him.

Why, he even told him he loved him.

(It's a knife in him, remembering.)

"Don't think that gives you the right."

He had been coming up here to sleep. Fell to snoring in the chair with his book in his lap, a few nights ago, and found it pleasurable. The smooth shallow rhythm of the hunter’s breath. And then somehow it became routine.

Eileen's meaning blooms black and ugly at the edges of her words. With it blossoms fury.

how dare you impugn an executioner of Logarius' band and a hunter of the church, how dare you accuse me of (I should flay you limb to limb you condescending _wretch_ )

Eileen waits.

"My gosh, Eileen," he says mildly. "I would never."

Then: "Thank you for thinking of him. I mean that, sincerely."

"Just remember that it's his body, not yours," says Eileen, and Alfred winces at the gracelessness, but he also understands this as her way of dismissing the idea. "Give me the basin. I'll bathe him. I'm not shy - and here you are fooling around with his shirt sleeves ... "

"What was his name?" Alfred asks her.

She tells him.

"...What a beautiful thing to call a person."

Eileen is undoing the hunter’s clothes. Something glints on his chest. 

Alfred excuses himself.

* * *

They are having somehow a moment of privacy. It happens, sometimes.

It occurs to Alfred: he is together in this room with him.

His thoughts turn to his botched martyrdom. Of course they do. It’s so easy when it’s quiet.

Hard for Alfred to think of Logarius now, as he is, alive so blasphemously and obscenely (et in saecula saeculorum); and his master  
(if you are a cemetery you're a sunlit field, a grave in the light, the image of angels, but _oh god you are a grave_ ; all your love is buried there)

"Don't leave," he tells the hunter, seated pointedly away (on the floor, his back against the bedframe). His expression is cold. His words are harsh and stilling. _If I have to live like this so do you. ___

The hunter sleeps as peacefully as always.

Alfred folds one hand over another. Small, deliberate movements calm him. His calloused fingers rest over the veins on his back of his hand. He is feeling his own heartbeat. He is remembering the life pulsing from his stomach down the knife. 

What have you done to me? Alfred thinks to himself.

* * *

He wants to know who he is. He needs to. He’s been asking about him in the black streets.

"They speak of you in one of two ways. As if you're a child or as if you're a mass murderer," Alfred tells him. He sits in the chair beside the bed with a teacup and he tries to keep the blanks from filling themselves: ("They talk about me?" "Of course they do. Wouldn't you like them to?" "Maybe I wouldn't."

No, what would the hunter have said? Alfred could have provided a few other lines. This is where the rope breaks, where his nature runs out of his hands.) (It's not worth doing, these little fantasy conversations, if it ends that way.)

His master’s words: Look at your ignorance coldly, cleanly.

Deny him. Deny him. Deny him.

He appraises the sleeper. His child's wrists, his murderer's hands.

 _By the good blood, you're thin,_ he tells him, and compulsively fits his hand into his shirt to see if he can feel his ribs. He can. He is aware of the ratio of himself to the hunter, the slender body and the large male hand.

He splays his fingers over his skin. Beneath his palm a nipple stiffens.

Beneath his clothes the hunter is wearing the wheel badge. 

With his heart in his throat he draws back.

* * *

(A long time ago a heretic told Alfred this: God is something you butcher. You cut and section the unfathomable down into your mortal reckoning,  
the way you slice yourself along your creed and rearrange the parts into a man you can live with. To love the gods is an act of violence. Your religion is a slaughterhouse.

Our eyes are yet to open.)

(You will not be able to contend with him. The mark of a true god is this: _he will resist you._ )

Alfred had exactly one dream about the hunter and in that dream the hunter said this:

Don’t touch me.

His throat was moving the wrong way. He laughed and it brought forth blood.

* * *

Then the dream becomes this:

Will you stop if I tell you no?

So plaintive and sad, and for a minute  
Human, almost

* * *

Alfred wakes from a dream he's already forgotten just as the lamp flame gutters out. No moonlight. His back is aching (damn that chair). Unawake and unthinking, he lurches forward, finds the bed with his hands, and falls onto the mattress, letting sleep take him over again. 

He is aware of the warmth next to him. He wakes up long in the dead night with his face buried in the hunter's neck and his hands on his body, and Alfred is ashamed.

In his sleep the hunter makes a pained sound and turns to him. He presses his face to Alfred’s chest.

Alfred freezes.

Nothing.

"Wake up," he whispers. "Wake up." And he calls the hunter by name.

Nothing.

And yet it happened. Something happened. A wisp in the dark. A thing so fleeting you’d ruin it by speaking aloud.

Something is in him and within him. This is his compassion.

Nothing.

Still he is blessed. He is blessed.

Alfred puts his arms around the hunter and he lays with him, aching in the dark.

* * *

You were warned.

Alfred is reading a collection of Logarius' writings, most of which were destroyed by the forces of Cainhurst. Fragments exist. Some cryptic and some straightforward. Alfred thought once that he understood his visions. He dared to think once, that he was that nameless force:

 _I have seen my end come […] thoughtlessly, falling [l]ike a folded bird_  
like […] a young [man]  
simply  
thinking of someone else

(and it was the hunter, wasn't it, the stranger from the east who brought him his crown)

 _I have seen his feet,_  
set upon the earth like dogs and the blood, and the grace, and the drowning,  
the midnight tidals, the hemorrhaging sun  
the death that follows him like a woman in love

And Alfred in his weakness lays down with him in his deathbed and waits.

And when he's this close to him he dreams.

It's coming to him. Closer and closer, on the borders of memory. And when Alfred wakes he feels something spiral out of him like a soundless bullet. Powder flash fading in the swollen backdrop of night.

The edges of something, a gulf of hunger. Like when you first found religion.

He is coming. He is always coming. He is never to arrive.

 _You burden me,_ he whispers. The hunter doesn't wake.

* * *

Late night. Matte black window. The sound of wind and rain. Thunder rolls at a millennial distance. Alfred is taken, then, by the glow of the fire in the lamp, however low. Small and bright and constant, reflection gliding on polished wood. Everything still and soft in the near-dark. He lays with the hunter in his arms.

 _I am grateful,_ he whispers. He falls asleep like this every night.

He rests his hand on the small of the hunter's back, where his shirt has ridden up by a fraction. Bare and exposed; warm sleeper's skin. Alfred drifts off this way, drowning in the thick of him: I love him. I love him. I love him.

* * *

Hours later. Eileen. She watches him. She haunts the corner of the room like a bad premonition.  
Alfred, in the doorway, prevented from moving towards him, surreptitiously does up the top button of his shirt and for a moment self-hatred levels everything within him from exhaustion to rational thought.

"When was the last time you saw the sun rise?" she asks him.

You're so close to the moon you no longer see the moon. Truth hits him like a blackjack.

"That’s what happened. He ascended. He’s got us all in his birthing dream," Eileen explains, pointlessly. "He's trying to think up a world."

Alfred turns and looks at the sleeper. "You will be great and terrible indeed."

A statement of fact. No bitterness. No awe.

* * *

Alfred wakes up with an erection. It would have happened sooner or later. He rolls over on his back and stares at the inky ceiling.

He's aware of the hunter's thigh against his, laying side-by-side with him. He's asleep. He could take care of himself. Alfred is functionally alone.

Warmth, a pleasant hint of sweat, clothes that have been worked in, something silvery, like moonlight. You could think about that. It's enough for a man. He'd never know.

He's not going to wake up.

Frustration and fury well up in him out of nowhere. Supplant arousal. No. No.

* * *

Locked doors. No light. The hunter sleeps with his lips parted and the scent of moonlight on the nape of his pale little neck. All fit for wringing.

 _I will not stand for this,_ Alfred tells him. He takes his wrist in hand because he can. He pins it uselessly to the bed. He takes his chin and yanks it towards him, he imagines he is leaving a bruise.

He could kiss him and he'd never even know. It has a literary aspect to it, even. True love's embrace.

Alfred presses his lips to the hunter's, soft and yielding, and Alfred takes in a sharp breath.  
That's not it, that's not love, it's the sharp drowning pull of arousal and then, like a dislocation, Alfred feels everything in the room become wrong.

This is perhaps the sharpest his senses have ever been. Alfred feels watched.

He eases off of the hunter.

"I would never," he tells him, "I would never."

He wants to subject him to caresses, his tender face and soft dark hair. Instead he lays chastely with his arms around his waist. More like a pair of brothers; one child clinging to another.

He feels immensely sorry for him then, for the poor lost sleeper. He yields and yields and yields.

"Come back to me," he whispers. "I am begging you, come back."

You are not a man I can contend with. You are not a god I can contend with.

 _You humble me,_ he tells him.

He misses, then, the way the hunter used to speak to him. Their conversations.

He slides to his knees on the floor and prays for a while with his face pressed to the hunter's hand. If he were a man given to tears he would have wept.

Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.

When he wakes up the hunter isn't there.

* * *

"Eileen!" he calls, taking the stairs down two at a time - "Eileen what have you done with him what have you done bring him back - "

He stops when he sees the man at the bottom of the stairs, looking at the walls as if he's never seen a room before.

"...It's you."

The hunter turns at the sound of his voice. There's pain and confusion in his eyes

(They reflect the dark. The pupils are wrong. Something about the way he moves is just slightly off - )

But then it's just the hunter from foreign lands, the poor sinner, the slender young boy; and he's in his arms, his face in his chest.

"I found the body, Alfred."

"I ... " Alfred doesn't know what to say, almost doesn't remember what he's thinking of. "I'm so sorry. I did not intend this for you."

"I know you didn't. I killed gods for you, you bastard. You didn’t even say goodbye."

"I'm sorry," he says again. He doesn't know what to make of any of this. "I'm sorry. I didn't die. I just woke up."

They both become aware of the fact that they're holding each other at the same time. The hunter draws away just enough to regard him.

"I did bad things, Alfred."

"I know," says Alfred. "I know everything," he lies. "It's all right." He would come to know them in time.

The hunter stares at him agape. Things inside of him are rearranging himself. Then he gives him a stiff little nod and just as Alfred is about to ask him if he meant what he said at Cainhurst, he grabs Alfred by the shirt and pulls him in for a hard kiss.

"What were you doing in my bed?" he breathes, when he pulls back. Alfred grips his waist, keeps him there.

"You...slept better when I was there."

"You didn't - "

"I thought about it," Alfred whispers back. "I almost...but no. I'm not like that. This is who I am."

_You know me._

Again. Almost timid this time, on both their parts. Alfred's lips tremble slightly. The hunter breathes.

"What a shame," the hunter tells him, taking him by the hand and leading him upstairs, falling backwards with a terrifying ease on that wretched bed. Alfred watches his eyes, half afraid he'll fall asleep again.

The hunter pulls him down. And then the hunter is a weight on his body, hands pinning his wrists to the bed. He pushes up to watch his face and smiles wickedly.

"Oh, you had your chance. Now it's my turn."

Alfred watches him, his eyes wide and searching. This is hunger. This is awe.

"I've never even considered - this way - with you, on top of - I mean, I'm a vir - "

The hunter slips his two fingers into Alfred's mouth. It shuts him up. (Tongue wet and cool. Eyes sliding shut. The hunter presses down on the tip of Alfred's tongue, just enough to let him know he's toying with him. Alfred feels a expansive desire to get his mouth fucked open. His tongue ripped out. His hand right down his throat. He lets him push back his head with the heel of his palm.)

The hunter dips his face to Alfred's exposed neck.

"If you had touched me," he whispers, smiling, "I would have cut out your throat."

Alfred learns he is aroused by threats. He is gone to it then, he rests his hands on the hunter's searching hips.

"Fuck me," he begs.

He wanted this.

The hunter presses a warm kiss to Alfred's neck and laughs breathlessly into his flesh. He's in love.

They lay with one another.

Afterwards: Alfred pillows his head on the hunter's chest. The hunter's arms are around him. His delicate fingers tangle in his hair.

Alfred props himself up on an elbow and looks at him and suddenly he’s stifling a laugh.

“What? _What?_ ” The hunter asks him, under his breath. He’s laughing too, it’s infectious.

“No, just imagine - Eileen’s also been looking after you.“ His voice drops to a whisper. “Imagine if she came in here and saw - “

“Is this her house? She’d have my head, wouldn't she?”

“I was just thinking she’d be coming after me!”

The hunter presses his forehead to Alfred’s, shoulders shaking, trying not to make any noise. Alfred can feel his smile without seeing it. 

The hunter lifts his chin and bites his nose.

“Ow! Why on earth - ”

“You deserved that. Besides, I’ve been wanting to do that.”

“You’re an insufferable little man.”

Alfred lays his head back down on his chest.

They’re quiet for a little while.

Then:

"I never thought I'd see you again," the hunter tells him, softly. "I thought you were gone."

They drift in one another. Alfred had been thinking, vaguely, of something much the same. He feels as if he should tell him what the hunter put him through but no, it’s all dissolving. That terrible dream. (Whatever horrors he has wrought: he is here, body soul and heart, and Alfred is with him, and he will be with him for as long as time obeys. Let him have made him into this.) So instead he lifts his head and with his eyes shut, finds his mouth, half-asleep.

"The sun is coming up," he tells him.


End file.
